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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Society vs Male Radicalisation II - Male Role Models/Surely This Time Our Plan Will Work

I was on the internet this week, and I found this:

Labour to help schools develop male influencers to combat Tate misogyny

It is interesting to note that there is an increasing shift towards talking about "role models" for young men and boys as a means of cooling the gender kerfuffle, rather than by repeating feminist talking points at males until they concede as was the case when I was a teenager. The Labour Party, the UK's apparent next government, has come up with policy to reduce the influence of Andrew Tate among schoolboys with the intended aim of safeguarding women and girls. It means to do this by creating counter role models to whom boys can look up to. This would not even the utterly embarrasing 30 year old boomers trying to guess what resonates with children, but would consist instead of older volunteer boys taken from within the same school. This if it is implemented, will have educators select the real life version of Will from Inbetweeners as its senior male role model and think themselves of sound mind for doing so. You are only ever going to get uncool loser types volunteering, and it is the fear of becoming an uncool loser (or worse) that motivates young men to go and consume manosphere content.

Feminism's defenders will counter that there are many existing role models available for men, often listing real or fictional people like Ryan Gosling, Marcus Rashford or Ted Lasso. These men are either fake or literal one percenters whose lifestyle an average young man has no hope of to attaining. This betrays a complete lack of understanding about why men choose the role models they do and how they attempt to emulate them. These role models are deliberately or implicitly chosen as role models for young men by people who aren't young men often because they display qualities that are useful, rather than valued, to society. This is because almost all policy dreamt up by institutions concerning Men and Boys is not to their benefit, but instead to neuter a perceived threat against Women, Girls and the wider society. For every Marcus Rashford, there are multiple Mason Greenwoods or Kurt Zoumas who continue to receive all the signifiers of male success and receive no punishment for any of their transgressions.

It is clear that what educational and social institutions want are meek, inoffensive and productive men who do not question the rules of society. This is in direct contrast to what young men want, which is to be outspoken, to be popular with women, to be socially and economically successful. No role model ever produced or selected by the state could manage this, particularly not when operating under the notion that it must maintain women's liberation, which itself requires the stifling of men. I question for how much longer this approach will be kept in place. There are hundreds of people like Andrew Tate across SM, each ready to teach boys what society is unable to teach them. Educators can more easily dispel Tate because of the sex trafficking offences and because Tate himself is a clown, but people like Hamza, whose lived experience is much closer to the boys he is trying to proselytize to than that of Tate's, they have no counterargument.

I think this is a general problem that the Political/Managerial Class wants a set of cog in machine type workers. Meek, follow orders, don't rock the boat, etc. More of the propaganda gets directed against men, simply because they fit worse into that mold by default. But in my experience women that don't fit are just as likely to get ground up and crushed.

One of the great ironies of this all is that institutions can't even be bothered to reward the meek men and women they claim to want. You see, there is a dirty little secret inside every large bureaucratic institution: You can just do things. Yes, you are supposed to get approval from your three managers, and buy in from the various stakeholders in departments A-Z. And if you do the things and they are good things, then you will get rewarded. The reason it works is that the process for stopping and punishing you is often as onerous as the process you were supposed to follow to get the thing done in the first place. So your enemies either won't bother, or they won't do things the official route. Welcome to internal office politics at a large org, you are now a player and not a pawn. Hope you made some allies before you started doing things.

Large institutions always ask for pawns. Because the players figure out the game and don't need to be invited. Its not like any existing players really want to invite more competition. Being a player is how to capture big rewards, but its also big risk. I am intentionally and consciously not a player at my current job. Being a pawn is low risk low reward. But I was a player for a little while in one of my previous jobs until I sorta maxed out my leverage and kept running into past mistakes I'd made. But the player slots are stressful. I'm riding out my past rewards for now while I have other priorities in life.

One of the great ironies of this all is that institutions can't even be bothered to reward the meek men and women they claim to want.

The appeal of the meek is supposed to be exactly insofar as you don't have to reward them to elicit compliance. At the limit, if you have to reward them like e.g. disagreeable but talented people, then you might as well just hire the latter.

The challenge that I suspect many with power would love to solve is "How do you turn disagreeable/moderate people into meek people?"

The challenge that I suspect many with power would love to solve is "How do you turn disagreeable/moderate people into meek people?"

That's easy, physical torture and brainwashing. The trick is to do it without significantly damaging their usefulness. Once they can do that at scale, we're well on our way to the Domination of the Draka.